A Single Spy by William Christie

Author:William Christie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

30

1940 Berlin

Alexsi strained his neck to look down the line of field gray uniforms arrayed along the walk on Tirpitzufer, then checked his wristwatch. His orders said to enter through Tirpitzufer 72–76, the four-story sandstone building up ahead that housed the Navy High Command. The problem was, everyone who worked there was lined up to do the same damned thing. If the queue didn’t move any faster he would be late on his first day. This would not do.

A curious thing. He didn’t see any enlisted men. Not that he blamed them, thinking back to his days as a sergeant officer candidate. He’d have gone a kilometer out of his way to keep from having to salute this many officers. It was bad enough being a first lieutenant with all the senior officers in Berlin.

Uncle Hans had gotten him posted to the Third Infantry Division, a Prussian Berlin unit. He’d emerged from training just in time to join it for the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Which was more like a training march through Czechoslovakia, really. The Czechs surrendered so completely that the only gunfire Alexsi experienced was one night when a drunken captain shot himself trying to get his Luger back into the holster.

Alexsi didn’t think there was much of interest about an infantry company garrisoning a Czech town, though Yakushev always emphasized that you never knew what would be of value. There were no NKVD to pass along information with a taynik, so he mailed the occasional report to a box in a Berlin post office covered by Soviet agents. Invisible writing between the lines of an anonymous love letter with a false return to sender. Two and a half grams of aspirin dissolved in four hundred grams of water was his ink. Aspirin was always available. It was a German invention, after all. Since one of his duties was censoring his company’s mail, the risk was negligible. His goal was to keep everyone happy with him, both Russian and German, while staying happily alive himself.

One thing that Yakushev always hammered into him was fighting the urge to confide. Alexsi never had the urge to confide in anyone. He made friends. People liked him, and he liked them. But when he moved on he never missed anyone, and never felt the urge everyone else had to stay in touch. He always had to turn homesick soldiers over to a sympathetic sergeant because when they whined they felt he looked at them as if they were crazy.

Upon the division’s return to Germany everyone got a campaign medal and there were rumors the Third would be turned into a mechanized unit. Before that could happen, Uncle Hans sat the new lieutenant down after dinner and made another one of his proposals. Alexsi had been prepared for the glory or death speech, but Hans surprised him by pointing out that he was the only survivor of his officer training class in the Great War, and with his languages perhaps his nephew would be happier in Abwehr, the German military intelligence service.

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